The article is nearly a year old.
Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
11–20 of 35 posts
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#12Went to order one, but they want $20 for regular ground shipping. May as well sell it for $45 and ship it for free. At least then I'd be less likely to whine about it.
Order from DigiKey[0] and shipping is more reasonable (A few bucks for ground).
[0] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/ICE40HX1K-STICK-EVN...
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#13It's great that Lattice is coming out with even cheaper FPGA dev board options. The bare-bones student dev kits from Altera and Xilinx are typically around $70, but $25 is a low enough price for hobbyists and beginners to begin experimenting as well. I'm not too sure about the USB stick form factor, though. I have Texas Instrument's F2013 dev board[0], which is also a USB stick-type device. It's adorable; it's cute;…
Just a heads up, the fourth link [3] is broken.
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#14Any suggestions of starter FPGA projects for someone who is a programmer but wants to get into FPGAs?
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#15Went to order one, but they want $20 for regular ground shipping. May as well sell it for $45 and ship it for free. At least then I'd be less likely to whine about it.
Order from DigiKey[0] and shipping is more reasonable (A few bucks for ground). [0] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/ICE40HX1K-STICK-EVN...
Nice! Thanks for the tip.
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#16It's great that Lattice is coming out with even cheaper FPGA dev board options. The bare-bones student dev kits from Altera and Xilinx are typically around $70, but $25 is a low enough price for hobbyists and beginners to begin experimenting as well. I'm not too sure about the USB stick form factor, though. I have Texas Instrument's F2013 dev board[0], which is also a USB stick-type device. It's adorable; it's cute;…
Just a heads up, the fourth link [3] is broken.
Oops, thanks. The correct link should be: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#17Specs: • 1280 Four input LUT logic cells • 64Kbit of RAM • 32Mbit flash • a PLL • Two sets of 8 digital I/O pins • One Pmod connector (2x6 0.10" socket, some sort of digital interface) • 5 LEDs • An IrDA transceiver • USB dongle form factor, programmed from USB, can look like a UART from FPGA to PC The design software appears to only function on the Windows operating system.
Windows is par for the course. If you want to develop for FPGAs, I suggest you accept Windows, at least to start with.
Xilinx can run on Linux and all that, but Windows is the path of least resistance, and FPGAs will give you enough trouble by themselves!
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#18Any suggestions of starter FPGA projects for someone who is a programmer but wants to get into FPGAs?
Start simple. Implement an adder, configured by some switches. Represent the output in binary on some LED's.
This will help you wrap your head around some of the important basics, and then you can go from there.
It is very difficult to debug FPGAs so it is important to "build up" to what you want in piece by easy to verify piece, instead of trying to build the whole thing at once and debug it later.
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#19Any suggestions of starter FPGA projects for someone who is a programmer but wants to get into FPGAs?
Depends on which peripherals you have.
* A good start is a stop watch (if you have a 7seg and buttons available)
* Implement a digital function generator without using look-up tables. (Can read values over serial)
* If you have access to an ADC and DAC implement an echo filter, then a tuneable butterworth
Re: Lattice's $24.99 FPGA Evaluation Kit
#20Any suggestions of starter FPGA projects for someone who is a programmer but wants to get into FPGAs?
Build state-machines or cpu using logic gates in logisim. It sounds complex but there are only a handful of primitives you have to understand. Learning that FPGA conditionals are equivalent to multiplexers is much easier to learn when you make one by hand.